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Back in December I decided to move my blog from a personal domain (jmstreet.info) to something which more accurately reflected the content. I decided to go with torrentialwebdev.com and at the time the move seemed to go well. I missed a few links in my initial sweep but the .htaccess file I put in place to redirect traffic seemed to work and my rankings were quickly transferred.&nbs...

I think I agree with IamJustinM on this one. It does feel a little manipulative to send out a message like this before the product has been received. I would be much more tempted to send out something with a followup email once the product is actually in there hands.

"If customers have a good experience and they want to share it, encouraging them with a widget, a badge or even just a simple link request . . ."

I don't think it makes much sense to have a warning symbol for bought links in the google toolbar. The majority of people using the toolbar are not going to be SEOs but ordinary users and may well attach far more significance to something like that than necessary. One option would probably be to have it off by default but how many people would go into the options to turn it on. Perhaps a special webmaster google toolbar?

Displaying this info in webmaster central probably makes more sense. People are still going to be throwing some money down the drain - presumably they would need to buy the link before they found out whether it was worth anything - but at least it would be limited.

"I mean if they can find and read the sitemap.xml file then a new search engine would be good to go on the relavent web."

If the sitemap url is in the robots.txt file or linked to from the homepage then all is well. But what if the sitemap is on an obscure url and linked to from nowhere? A webmaster could still get all the benefits of a sitemap in google by pinging them but the data would be unobtainableby a startup.

A sitemap could conceivably be a valuable of intelligence to your competitors so it is not unlikely that some webmasters will attempt to obscure the file.

Maybe I'm being overly harsh on these startups but the only aspect of webmaster central which I think might be truly important is the geo-targeting information. I can see how that would be truly valuable.

Sitemaps, crawl rate and domain preference I suspect is information that would be nice to have but isn't exactly essential. On the other hand, they've got a tough task ahead of them and I wouldn't like to predict which will be the straw that breaks the proverbial camels back.

Either way it is an interesting perspective. It would be interesting to know the percentage of sites using webmaster central and related offerings and the percentage of sites pointing to a sitemap file in a robots.txt file.

This sounds like a valid excuse reason to visit facebook while at work.

For some reason I was labouring under the old single/married/divorced classifications which make absolutely no sense given the original demographic for facebook. 'In a relationship' would make more sense though that would be ignoring the whirlwind romance.

Interestingly the facebook ads platform doesn't allow you to target 'It's complicated' and 'In an open relationship.'

On the second point, they've raised a whole heap of cash so I would hope that they could keep going without showing any and every advert they possibly can until they have a working system in place. They have stated that their intention is that you never even notice the ads.

"Given that SEOmoz is one of about four blogs I have time to read regularly & the only one that I saw who posted on the subject today, I think it was an important post."

In this case I may have been overly critical. My feed reader has been positively swamped with posts relating to this today. Yet another reminder I really need to trim down my list of feeds.

Scott wrote

"I'd argue that what's even more dangerous than "a little knowledge" is an attitude that doing 'something' won't make enough of a difference, so why not do nothing at all?"

A lot of small changes can make a big difference when it comes to anthropogenic global warming but my worry is at what cost. For example we're told that CFLs are better than incandescent lightbulbs but the facilities for disposing of CFLs correctly are almost non-existant in many towns. At least this seems to be the case in the UK. A little knowledge, use CFLs, versus the full story, use CFLs but be careful how you dispose of them.

I also have two issues with carbon offseting. Firstly that people will use it as a get 'out of jail free card'. The mentality being, "I've paid my dues, I can do whatever I want." I don't think this is the mentality at seomoz, you were already doing a lot, but I believe some will follow this approach.

Secondly, I'm not sure I'm convinced by the carbon reducing credentials of these schemes yet. Reforestation is great for the local environment, reduced erosion, hopefully increased biodiversity, but I'm not sure we really understand the extent of carbon sequestration that results yet. Carbonfund.org doen't seem to have any hydroelectric projects but this is an even bigger issue. You're trading 'clean' energy production for loss of potentially unique habitats and the slow release of carbon from the organic matter which becomes trapped in the reservoir.

Jeremy, I'm partially with you on this. The end result seems to be just a lot of hot air produced by a lot of bloggers only slightly better informed than their audience. And we all know how danagerous a little knowledge can be.

As for the power thing though I doubt much more will be consumed. The servers would have been running whether it was 'Blog Action Day' or not.

I don't mean to be critical of seomoz here, this post was actually one of the best attempts I've seen today, but I wanted to post this somewhere.

Your hard work is truly appreciated. Not only for stemming the flow of rubbish but also for your work on those posts that are worthy of being posted.

I'm not a very active blogger and my 'art' is still unrefined. I did notice the small changes you made to my first, and so far only, Youmoz submission though and they have highlighted a couple of ways I can improve my posts in future. For that I would like to thank you both.

". . . but you will come away with a lot of answers, teh right questions and the knowledge of where and how to solve them."

Just for those whose memories don't stretch to last Friday the seminar is on October 1st. I think October is as accurate as it gets in the post above.

I'm in the same boat as you Special K. Though I still have hopes of making in to the future of web apps conference in London a couple days later so I can't complain too much. Just need to get the time off.

I don't post much on my personal blog and I don't have many comments but without exception I find the comments very useful. Whether it be bug reports on scripts I've written or expanding on my comments in the post they make the site a better place.

Having the bug reports out in the open reduces repetition saving me time. The comments expanding on or offering a counterpoint to my post could certainly have been posted on another blog but generally speaking they would have been very short posts and anyone trying to follow a discussion would be bouncing around the web like crazy. Sometimes it just makes sense to group a discussion together in one place.

Frank Paynter, the owner of the meankids.org site, has said how sorry he is that this has happened. Hopefully that means he will want to help out and if he still has them isn't going to delete any logs from the site.

I would imagine that wordpress.com keeps logs for a while so the police should be able to get the IPs of the people who made these comments and hopefully follow it up with the ISPs involved.

Hopefully those responsible can be identified and dealt with appropriately.

Having said this though if they haven't been identified already all this publicity could be a serious problem. If I were them I'd be wiping my hard drive.

"These people hurt not only her, but the many, many readers who love her blog and get a wealth of valuable information from it."

I would like to add those who haven't yet discovered her blog to the list here. I'm relatively new to this corner of the blogosphere and haven't, or hadn't, yet come across her blog. In the multiple posts I've read in the past few hours on the subject though it's clear that she is very highly thought of by many people whose opinions I value. Hopefully she will continue posting and I'll probably go through her archive in the next few days anyway.

I've had a few hours to think about it now and I'm still not entirely sure how to respond. The whole thing sickens me. As you say there are your usual trolls which I think most people with any sort of online presence will have come across but what has happened here takes it to an entirely different level.

Would something similar happen to a man? I think it is highly unlikely. Death threats are certainly possible but not the threats of sexual violence. In my, entirely unqualified, opinion the type of people who are capable of this level of unrestrained hate are so insecure that they wouldn't be willing to question their own sexuality.

"Deceit would be threatening the host of the negative news, or something of that sort."

Only if you're bluffing.

I've never had a problem personally with bad news (I don't have any clients) but I do sometimes worry about someone searching for me by name and finding another Jonathan Street. My site ranks well in yahoo and msn but not yet in Google.

Still, I haven't done anything about it yet so I guess I can't be too worried.

It's far from perfect but if I had a serious condition I would much prefer to trust the NHS. Private hospitals may be shiny and new but being exposed to doctors from each (and both) institution(s) has convinced me that when your life is on the line it's the NHS that you want. February 13, 2007

Being from the UK I'm not to concerned about how much my treatment would cost should I fall ill. That's not to say I don't think about how much a prolonged illness could cost.

Besides lost income there are also potential travel costs and a whole bunch of other little things that you can't avoid but which are not available on the NHS.

Private health insurance here is a luxury, though while nice, isn't really needed. I have considered critical illness cover though which pays out if you become ill to cover all the little things. For my circumstances though I don't think I need it. I have no dependents or other financial responsibilities and sufficient savings to keep me going for about a year.

Insurance is often an essential safety net but it can be expensive and in my case at least, personal savings are the way to go.

As a Windows user my approach to security has been inherently lax – I set updates to automatically on the PC, and that’s it. Let Microsoft deal with everything else.
It’s an attitude that has permeated building my own websites. Whenever a latest software release is made available, it has never seemed a priority to upload the updated files. Not so now.

I know the Microsoft approach isn't really the ideal solution to improved security but for the current state of things it isn't a bad approach.
Some sort of registration process enabling automatic upgrades shouldn't be that difficult to implement and would probably use less bandwidth than your entire userbase downloading your entire package with each minor security fix.
I'm actually curious whether any project has adopted this model. January 16, 2007

For example, if you were to reverse the paid and organic results, I'm betting the advertisers would see a dramatic drop-off in CTR, while the organic results would receive a huge boost.

I couldn't get the idea of simply moving the results around on the page, resulting in what I would suspect would be an improvement for the advertisers, out of my head. Not what you meant at all. All became clear once I realised you meant just the ad copy. What can I say, it's late.
I'm currently in the process of redesigning my site and one of the changes I'm making is going from a default serendipity blog install, with no meta descriptions, to custom meta descriptions for each page. Hopefully see some improvements once things settle down from all the changes. January 01, 2007

I've just tried to contact them about what I assume will be a typo in their official rules and got a permanent failure for the mail delivery.
If anyone does want to apply probably best to contact Eastpoint directly. December 10, 2006

I've not really been subscribed to your rss feed for long enough to notice a change in post quality but if I ever get around to culling the rss feeds I subscribe to seomoz would be one of the least likely to be dropped at the present time.
Also, as frak has previously pointed out the vote option seems to be still enabled even though I have already voted.
December 08, 2006